Sara was editorial director of Zócalo Public Square, a non-profit that blends live events and humanities journalism in partnership with educational, cultural, and philanthropic institutions, publishing original daily journalism syndicated to hundreds of media outlets worldwide.

Before that, she was West Coast Editor in Charge at Reuters, where she was responsible for general news coverage from the Rockies to the Pacific, and vice president of digital news at NBC4 Southern California. Under her leadership at NBC4 the station won its first-ever national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for coverage of breaking news, won the first Murrow Regional Award for NBCLA.com, and hosted the first digital fellowship in partnership with Asian American Journalists Assn. She was the digital point person for the NBC4 I-Team, which won an IRE Award for exposing dangerous bus companies.

As the recipient of a John S. Knight (JSK) Journalism Fellowship from Stanford University, she spent a year studying mental illness and criminal law. She is an active member of the Online News Association, routinely leading sessions at the annual conferences and serving as a mentor at the ProPublica Diversity Breakfast. In the past she has led sessions that focus on blended legacy-digital newsrooms and wrestle with questions about the present and future state of journalism.

Before NBC Sara was a regional editor at AOL's hyperlocal Patch.com, where she spearheaded the Southern California operation, launching the first sites in the state and guiding the establishment of the brand in the region.

Sara's journalism experience is rooted in newspapers and magazines, both mainstream and alternative. She has worked as a Mother Jones contributor, as a staff writer specializing in long-form storytelling for the LA Weekly and as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Northridge Earthquake.

She was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times op-ed page and served for six years as an adjunct journalism professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.

She holds a bachelors degree in philosophy from St. John's College and a masters in journalism from UC Berkeley. An avowed non-athlete, Sara ran the LA Marathon and lived to blog about it.

For work on her memoir, she was awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge and the Carey Institute for Global Good, as well a research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, an Australian Shepherd and a bunny named Bunny.